Info for Nature

Following the triumphant success of his 2017 album Life Is Fine, Australia’s greatest and most enduring songwriter Paul Kelly returns in 2018 with his new studio album Nature, set for release on October 12.
Nature is launched by the first single ‘With The One I Love’ and a video directed by Siân Darling, shot in Melbourne’s Old Magistrates’ Court, where Ned Kelly was famously tried and sentenced to death in 1880. Kelly explains, “I’m on trial in the witness box, Mojo Juju plays the judge and Vika and Linda are my defence lawyers.”
‘With The One I Love’ continues in a similar rocking spirit to last year’s ‘Firewood and Candles’ (which won Paul the coveted APRA Award for Song Of The Year) and again echoes the melodic guitar rock of Paul’s 80s work with The Messengers.
Kelly entered the studio in Melbourne in March and May this year to record Nature with his esteemed band – Peter Luscombe on drums, Bill McDonald on bass, Ash Naylor and Dan Kelly on guitars and Cameron Bruce on keyboards. “I love playing with them,” he says. “They can morph from delicate scientists to big riff rockers and all states in-between.” It also features the vocals of Vika and Linda Bull, his daughters Madeleine & Memphis Kelly, Alice Keath and Kate Miller-Heidke.
Nature brings together poems from five literary greats – Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Phillip Larkin – alongside poems that Kelly wrote himself and later put to music, and his own original songs that came along in the usual way, as sounds sung to chords that then turned into words.
Explaining the creative process behind Nature, Kelly says, “I’ve been playing around with poems since 2012 and it’s now become another way for me to write songs. I think most writers get sick of themselves and their own habits so it’s a happy surprise, after 40 years of writing songs, to find a new way.
“What links them all is the natural world – trees, birds, animals, plants, dust, desert, water – and human nature’s small place in that world. Most of the pieces were written over the last four years in and around the recording sessions for ‘The Merri Soul Sessions’, ‘Seven Sonnets And A Song’ and ‘Life Is Fine’. I didn’t realise I had the makings of another album until I put the songs in a folder and saw the titles staring me in the face. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re doing until you look back.
“I think of ‘Nature’ as a companion piece to ‘Life Is Fine’, itself full of moons, rain, rocks, rivers, seas, smells and lovers.” (Paul Kelly)
Paul Kelly, lead and backing vocals, acoustic and electric guitarsBill McDonald, bassCameron Bruce, piano, keyboards, organ, backing vocalsAshley Naylor, lead guitar, backing vocalsDan Kelly, rhythm guitar, backing vocalsPeter Luscombe, drums, percussion, backing vocalsKate Miller-Heidke, backing vocals on "Bound to Follow (Aisling Song)"Vika Bull, backing vocalsLinda Bull, backing vocalsMadeleine Kelly, backing vocalsMemphis Kelly, backing vocalsAlice Keath, backing vocals

Paul Kelly
has recorded over 21 studio albums as well as several film soundtracks (Lantana and the Cannes 2006 highlight, Jindabyne) and two live albums, in an influential career spanning more than thirty years. He was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1997. In 2017, he was appointed as an officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to the performing arts and to the promotion of the national identity through contributions as a singer, songwriter and musician.